Subprocess quote problem

[Fredrik Lundh]

Adriano Monteiro wrote:

> I'm working on a script that executes a command with arbitrary
> options. Most of its options works fine with subprocess, but at least
> one (as far as I know) is giving me a headache. The program that I'm
> trying to execute is Nmap, and the problematic option is the -iL, that
> is used to indicate a file with the targets that nmap should scan.
>
> If I open my terminal, and write: nmap -iL "/tmp/target_list" , nmap
> picks the file, read it and scan every target written inside it.

when you do this, the shell strips away the quotes and passes the strings
"-iL" and "/tmp/target_list" to the nmap executable.

> But, if I try to use the same scan on my command execution script, it
> makes nmap raise a strange error:
>
> "Failed to open input file "/home/adriano/umit/test/targets" for reading
> QUITTING!"

subprocess does quoting itself, so those extra quotes are passed through to
nmap itself.  try removing them from the string literal; they're not really part
of the argument value.

</F>